Monday, November 24, 2008

Ask Coriel: Help With Healing Heroics

Jinkadink of Mannoroth asks:

I decided to spec holy to get in groups. I was wondering if you had any guidelines in terms of what stats to shoot for, for heroics. Right now I'm about 1100 +spell, 15% crit, 115 mp5 (without BoW). From what I've read on EJ I should be stacking int wherever possible, but I feel like my mp5 is really low. Although I have so much mana (13k unbuffed) I'm not sure running out is an issue, unless the fight goes beyond 5 minutes.

I did manage to heal heroic UK with two early wipes due mostly to my newbness (remembering to use Lay of Hands would have prevented both). I just got the feeling that I was undergeared while running it because I was really struggling to keep up with the tank on most pulls and I rarely ever had time to heal anyone else taking damage.

I haven't really healed with the new 3.0 talents, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

EJ focuses on Int because both Replenishment and Divine Plea work of 'Total' Mana. So if you increase your Total Mana, you regenerate more. Add to that the extra spellpower and crit, and you can see why EJ is promoting Int over Mp5. Now, in a heroic, you might not have Replenishment, and you might not use Divine Plea as often, since the fights are shorter. So the value of Int is less.

However, looking at your stats, I think you need more +healing. EJ kind of takes it for granted that you are trying to stack as much +heal as possible, even if they don't explicitly mention it. 1100 seems rather low for an 80 attempting heroics. I would really focus on +heal, and not worry about regen as much.

As for the situation you are having trouble with, that's what Beacon of Light was made for. It's a new tool, so it will require practice. But try and keep it on the tank as much as you can, especially in boss fights. It will allow you to heal the other party members and still keep the tank up.

Remember to Judge (use a focus macro) to keep the Haste bonus up.

/cast [target=focus] Judgement of Light

(You can set your focus with the /focus command, or bind it to a key in the Options menu.)

Also, I would advise using the glyphed Seal of Light, as that would make your spells more powerful. You sound to me like you are fine with managing your mana, but you need your heals to be more powerful, to do more healing-per-second. The cure for that is more +heal, and to a lesser extent, more +haste.

8 comments:

That crit rate is awfully low. Keep in mind that crit gives bigger heals and returns mana. You can get 19% holy crit using talents in the holy and early part of the ret trees alone - not including crit on items or crit from int.

Taking my time to get to 80 so not sure on exact stats you need but Rohan is right your Spellpower is too low.

As for the exact stats you need you'll see all different people saying different things, intellect only, spellpower first, crit is best etc but paladin healing is about balance.

I spent a lot of time at 70 looking into this and while things have changed a bit some key thoughts. There are two aspects for any healer, your heal per second (HPS) and your total healing, you need HPS to get through burst damage, you need more total healing to get through longer fights.

For maximising heal per second haste is best but it comes at a huge cost not adding to your total healing, at 70 you only really needed to stack haste once you reached sunwell. Spellpower comes a close second to haste for increasing your HPS and also does a decent job of increasing your total healing, you should definitely look to keep increasing this at all levels.

To increase your total healing through a fight intellect and MP5 are needed. I need to have a look again at things post expansion to check the best balance between these. You seem ok as you are at the moment, as you gear up you should see these stats grow naturally.

My research strongly suggests that crit for healadins is much over rated. You can gain greater HPS from both haste and spellpower and greater total healing from intellect and MP5 (some people disagree with this second conclusion). Again, your crit will increase naturally as you gear up.

As you get towards the end game you may have to pay a little more careful attention when choosing gear on your balance between HPS and total healing. There are some items which give great HPS but minimal total healing, some the other way around. Often these which are on the extremes of one or the other aren't ideal, unless you are getting into a very specialised 25 man raid roll.

Having a high capacity for total healing gives you greater options for throwing in Holy Lights when required, rather than sticking to the more mana efficient Flash of Light. This may mean that an item with a small increase to your spell power but large decrease to your intellect/MP5 may not be ideal.

At 70 I was using an Excel tool which I got off Curse called Paladin heal calculator or something like that, not sure if its been updated for the expansion. There is another tool RAWR (search google to get it) which I have only used for dps but also has a healadin section. These both show you the total effects of gear upgrades under different scenarios and are VERY useful in deciding what to use.

Its this last point which you should be aware of, under different fight scenarios you're going to want different stats, Spellpower v intellect, and use different tools, flash of light, holy light, holy shock, beacon of light etc. Be paladin, be flexible, keep some reasonable balance and you'll be fine.

Coriel is right on the ball with this one. You need more +heal. There is an excellent paladin healing gear guide on plusheal.com pally forums. The gear listed is easy to obtain and you have choices in which secondary stats to stack. When it comes to heroics, crit is the stat to go for after sp and int. Mp5 us more useful when you come into the raiding scene. Some haste couldn't hurt either. I have about 5% haste from the rating on items, and you get 15% more from judging. That will make Holy Light almost a 2sec cast. Make sure you get all the available enchants and gems for your gear (you can even get by with some TBC ones if the economy on your server is inflated). Also, healadin itemization is very close to that of elemental shaman, so dont be afraid to roll on a few mail pieces if no one needs (Just dont roll against the shaman :P)